Chapter 3: Where the Hell is My Flying Car?

Flying cars are real.  They do exist.  You can actually buy one, for anywhere from $200,00 to about $1.7 million.  Of course, for $1.7 million, you could buy two Lamborghinis, a Mclaren, A Tesla, a big pick-up, and a Cessna for the flying part, which makes more sense.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

Harrison Ford's character is flying in one at the beginning of the Blade Runner trailer.  George Jetson had a flying car in the Jetsons cartoon, that folded up into a briefcase.  I saw them repeatedly in Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines, in the 1970's, when I was a kid.  Those magazines made it sound like we would all have flying cars by the year 2000.  Bruce Willis had the classic, movie-type flying car design, while playing futuristic a taxi driver in The Fifth Element, in futuristic New York City.  Many futuristic movies, from some Star Wars films on down the list, have had flying cars in them.

It's 2019 as I write this, we're in "the future" Generation X kids, like me, saw predicted in books, TV shows, and movies, as kids and teenagers.  But we don't see flying cars buzzing above the traffic on the freeways, or whizzing through our skyscrapers like in Blade Runner.  While we're at it, there are no human colonies on the moon, also widely expected by many for our time period by people 30 or 40 years ago.  There are no human colonies on Mars.  We can't go to a hotel on the moon for the weekend.  There are no bionic men or women who can run 50 miles per hour, or run 80.4 kmph in other countries.  Scotty, from the original Star Trek Enterprise, can't beam us up to an orbiting starship.  None of us has a hovering land speeder like young Luke Skywalker.  None of us have a fully functioning Mach 5 like Speed Racer, or a giant robot to fly us around like Johnny Sako.  Most of all, we haven't had a worldwide nuclear apocalypse that allows a few of us to wander the desert, building deadly rat rods, stealing gas, and partying.  OK, our deserts are full of wandering tweekers and crackheads who pretty much do just that, but it's just not the same as Mad Max in Road Warrior.

As I looked through all of these movie trailers below, to refresh my memory about the "futures" that 20th century novelists, TV, and film writers predicted, one thing became glaringly obvious.  Those intelligent, motivated, well meaning writers of the past got "the future" almost completely wrong.  Take a look for yourself, these are the movie trailers and TV shows I looked at:

Metropolis (1927),
1984 (1956)
The Time Machine (1960)
The Jetsons TV cartoon (1962-63)
Lost in Space TV show clip (1965)
Farenheit 451 (1966)
Star Trek- original TV show (1966)
Planet of the Apes (1968)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Soylent Green (1973)
The Six Million Dollar Man TV show (1973-78)
Rollerball (1975)
A Boy and His Dog (1975)
Logan's Run (1976)
Logan's Run TV show intro (1977-78)
Damnation Alley (1977)
Mad Max (1979)
Escape From New York (1981)
Mad Max 2: Road Warrior (1981)
Blade Runner (1982)
The Terminator (1984)
1984 (remake- 1984)
Apple Macintosh "1984" commercial (1984)
Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
Brazil (1985)
Robocop (1987)
Judge Dredd (1995)
Tank Girl (1995- My personal favorite of all of these)
Gattaca (1997)
The Fifth Element (1997- My second favorite)
The Matrix Trailer (1999)
Minority Report (2002)
Aeon Flux (2005)
V for Vendetta (2005)
The Hunger Games (2012)
Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

The weird thing about this look at "the future" is that flying cars actually do exist.  There have been many functional flying cars, for nearly 100 years now.  As crazy as it sounds, Charles Lindbergh actually piloted one once, about 80 years ago.  The Moller Sky Car is the closest functional, real world, flying car to the ones we've seen in so many movies, and read about in sci-fi books.  The Moller Sky Car never went into production, for business financing reasons.  You can see one hovering in the video at the top of this blog post.  The Terrafugia Transition, the newest flying car, may go on sale this year.  Flying cars sounded amazing in science fiction stories, they look cool in movies, and they actually exist in real life.  But we don't all have flying cars, like those 1970's magazines I read predicted.  They just didn't take off in the real world (pun intended), and become widespread.

I was born in 1966, so my first memories are from around 1971, a time when the Apollo space program was sending men to the moon.  That period of the early 1970's, with repeated manned missions to the moon actually happening, was an exciting time of looking forward to the future.  A lot of people then, in my formative years as a little kid, thought we would have colonies on the moon and Mars in 30 or 40 years, which would be the years from 2000-2010.  Actual, intelligent adults then actually thought we would be able to take a week's vacation on the moon by now.  A lot of really smart people then believed that we would be sending people on long term space voyages to other star systems by now.

Yet us humans haven't even been back to the moon in the 48 years since (officially, anyhow).  We haven't sent people to Mars.  There is a dummy human in a Telsa car heading to the asteroid belt, though, so that's something.  We do have really cool, unmanned rovers wandering slowly around Mars, explained here, which is cool and informative.  We can't go for a weekend in space as average individuals, which many smart, 1970's era people, thought might be possible by now.

Yet, like the flying cars, space tourism actually does exist.  I actually met one man in the 1990's who went on to become a space tourist.  Guy Laliberte', co-founder of Cirque Du Soleil, paid $20 million to go up in a Russian rocket, and spend a week on the International Space Station as a tourist.  Here's actual footage of Guy and the crew in space.  He's the bald guy with the red clown nose.  He's French Canadian, so he's speaking French to his daughter in the clip.  He's one of a very small group of actual space tourists alive in today's world.

A clown in space.  Street performing accordion player, stilt walker, and fire breather.  World traveler.  New wave circus founder.  Entrepreneur, philanthropist, high stakes poker player, and space tourist, Guy Laliberte'.  He's one interesting character.  I'm a little bummed I had to go to RT, the Russian propaganda channel, for this clip, but that's life.

Closer to home, for me, anyhow, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic plans to start taking people, space tourists, to the edge of space, for a bargain price compared to what Guy paid.  It was supposed to be possible this year, in 2019.  But years of technical delays have set the program back.  The first actual space tourists on Virgin Galactic are tentatively scheduled to fly next year, in 2020, if things go well.  Their base of operations is in the Mojave desert, north of L.A., about an hour from where I'm sitting now.  Here's a clip of a Space Ship Two flight with crew members from early 2019.  Space tourism is real, like the flying cars.  But, again, it's nothing like what people imagined would be possible by now, back in the 1970's days of the Apollo missions.

Some of the amazing ideas, dreamed up by futuristic writers and film makers of the 20th century, have actually come true.  If you're really rich.  But they didn't become popular, like so many people predicted.  Why did smart people 40-50-60 years ago predict the future so poorly?  Why didn't they get more things right?  What makes predicting the future so hard?  That's the question I'm exploring here.  Then I'll explain what kind of future I see emerging in the next ten or 20 years, and how and why I came to these conclusions.

Instead of flying cars and land speeders, we got GPS located and tracked, rental electric scooters, which, I have to admit are pretty freakin' cool to have around.  These are super popular in downtown L.A., and in Hollywood, where this group was sitting in late 2019.  Photo by Steve Emig

Blogger's note- 8/26/2023- I have not changed any of the wording in any of these posts since I wrote them in 2019-2020.  I even left in the typos I originally missed.  "Dystopia" makes a lot more sense now, after we've been through 3 1/2 years of chaos.  You can read more of my thoughts on my Substack:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

Chapter 4: Did the Futuristic Movies and TV Shows of My Generation X Childhood Get Anything Right?

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A look at the 1960's era futuristic cartoon, The Jetsons, from the view of creators Hanna Barbera.  

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

This is where I first saw the idea of a flying car, The Jetsons.  In the lives of Generation X kids, like me, during grade school years, The Jetsons was a funny cartoon watched either in the morning, before going to school, or afternoons when school was over.  Created in 1962-63, just before the birth of Generation X, The Jetsons was a comic look at what the "far off 21st century" might be like.  Even as a kid, it seemed pretty ridiculous.  Funny thing is, mingled in with the crazy flying cars and sky houses, this early 60's cartoon actually predicted several of the real technologies of today's 2019 world better than all the more serious novels and movies of that era.  Video phone calls/teleconferencing, treadmills, personal computers, action sports (sort of), moving sidewalks,video watches, minimalist furniture, big screen TV's, video court appearances, AR fashion shopping (really, here it is), the internet (sort of), cell phone-like communication, and some often used medical technologies, all of these showed up in The Jetsons in the early 1960's.  Crazy.


As a middle aged man of 53 now, I've seen an incredible amount of technological "progress" happen in my life.  It amazes me how different our world is from the future predictions of the relatively low technology era of my childhood.  As I mentioned in the earlier chapters, we don't all have flying cars many predicted, we're not making interstellar space trips, we don't have armies of human-like android robots, and there has been no global nuclear apocalypse.

Most of the main themes of the 20th century sci-fi novelists and movie makers have not actually happened.  We never got many of the high technologies predicted, yet we got many technologies, just as powerful, that were not predicted.  We have smart phones, tablets and laptops and now average individuals can communicate with about half the people on the planet, individually, or collectively.  We have the internet, wifi, and online platforms and social media, so average people can publish text, photos, and video that can be seen, potentially, by a couple of billion people.  We have GPS that can find locations everywhere, and direct us to them.  Then we have a whole slew of other technologies at work in our current world, in addition to communications.  We all know that, though we take nearly all of them for granted these days.

But the visionary writers and movie makers did get a couple of major themes right.  One major theme that runs through the dystopian futuristic novels and movies of the 20th century is the idea of an all powerful, authoritarian government, with surveillance cameras and systems for watching the public's every move.  That idea of all-encompassing surveillance, came true, as we all know, there are now video cameras all over our urban environment.  Our cell phones, tablets, laptops, have microphones, digital photo and video cameras, which can be hacked, potentially.  Our smart phones and our cars have GPS tracking, and cars also have microphones and cameras in many cases.  There are also computers in cars that track where you go, how fast you drive, whether you use your turn signals, and other data.  If that's not enough, a lot of people are now actually buying "bugs," voice enabled devices, like Amazon's Alexa or Google's version, and even putting video cameras in their houses, opening their private conversations up to potential collection, surveillance, and data mining.

  If that's not enough, we fill online platforms, sharing personal photos, comments, stories, on social media, and in blogs, and other online sites and apps.  In addition to all of that, most of us are probably wearing or carrying items embedded with RFID tags, usually that we don't realize.  These tags are the things that set off anti-theft systems at the doors of stores.  They can also ad to the digital data trail we leave behind as we go through our days in today's digital world.  With nearly everything we do, and everywhere we go, we leave a whole bunch of digital tracks, which ad to our metadata files.  George Orwell warned us in his classic novel, 1984, that "Big Brother is watching."  He's right, in today's world, all kinds of people, including Big Brother-type organizations, are watching.

 Not only is Big Bother watching, at Universal Studios, in Studio City, California, a Big Minion is watching.  See him?  Photo by Steve Emig.

Many people are freaked out by this, as I was many years ago.  The reflex action against all this crazy surveillance technology is to "go off the grid."  But even if you go out in the woods somewhere, to get away from it all, you might get your photo taken by somebody's trail cam, looking for deer, coyotes, poachers, or a sasquatch.  If you dodge the trail cams, you might wander under someone's drone flying overhead.  If you manage to miss the drones, there are still dozens, perhaps hundreds, of satellites in space, some of which have cameras that can tell if you need to shave, or get a manicure, from up in space.  "The grid," is almost everywhere these days.

Big Brother is watching... but so is little sister, and she's got faster thumbs

George Orwell, in 1984, predicted the high tech surveillance police state, Big Brother, way back in the 1940's.  What Orwell didn't predict was that almost every person in the future world would also have cameras, digital still and video cameras, connected to communications technology that can access millions, potentially billions, of people.  Yes, Big Brother is now watching, but so is "little sister," and that changes everything.

Cell phone cameras in action, as a member of the street performing crew, The Damn Team, flips over four audience members.  The Hollywood Walk of Fame, Hollywood & Highland, Hollywood, California, late 2019.  Photo by Steve Emig.

The other main technology that dystopian future novels, movies, and TV shows got right is "video phone calls.  I first saw this myself in The Jetsons, as a grade school kid, watching the re-runs in the early 1970's, like most of Generation X.  In The Jetsons, a little video screen would pop up from George's desk, or Jane's kitchen counter, and they would have video conferences with others.  If Jane Jetson was still in her bathrobe in the morning, a sort of shield would come up, and make her appear made up and dressed, as she talked to her friends.  It was something like a filter on Snapchat.

The "video phone calls" also happened on the big screen on the bridge of the original Star Trek TV show, and small video calls happen in Blade Runner, and some other movies and shows.  So many of the 20th century movies and TV shows, predicted the idea of Skype or Facetime, decades ahead of its invention.

If you go through all these movies that I linked above, and all the similar TV shows and movies, you could find little things, little devices and pieces of technology that we do have in today's world.  But by and large, all of these futuristic predictions from novels and movies got most of the future wrong.  The "futuristic" cities, the flying cars everywhere, the hordes of human-like androids, and everyone wearing the same clothes, those things just didn't happen.  That's not the world we live in today.

In Blade Runner, made way back in 1982, set in Los Angeles in November 2019, the big problem was escaped replicants going on a killing spree.  In real life Los Angeles in November, 2019, the L.A. Times just took a poll of residents to see what the biggest problem in L.A. is.  The answer?  95% of people in today's L.A. said homelessness is the biggest problem in 2019 Los Angeles.  H.G. Wells, George Orwell, and other visionary writers didn't see that one coming.

Hollywood, California, the land where dreams, and nightmares, can come true.  Homeless man passed out on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, near the corner of Hollywood boulevard and Highland, the top tourist spot in Hollywood today.  The paradox of our modern world in transition.  December 2019.  Photo by Steve Emig.

Blogger's note- 8/26/2023- I have not changed the wording in any of these posts since I wrote them in 2019-2020.  I didn't even fix the typos that I originally missed.  "Dystopia" makes a lot more sense now that we have seen 3 1/2 years of chaos.  You can check out more of my thoughts on my Substack:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

43

Chapter 5: Was there anyone in the 20th century who did get "the future" right?

Was there anyone in the mid to late 20th century who actually did predict, to a reasonable degree, the world we now live in?  Yes, actually there was.  The the husband and wife futurist team of Alvin and Heidi Toffler saw, and forecast, many of the major trends that led to our world today.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

More important, they thought those trends through, and wrote about them in several books.  Alvin Toffler forecast a great deal of the more important trends that actually shaped the world we find ourselves in today.  With his first major book, Future Shock, published in 1970, Toffler saw the wave of new technologies, primarily computer based, that were going to sweep through society and radically change our everyday lives.  He forecast that most of us would have trouble dealing with the rapid change coming, and whole swathes of people would simply be left behind in the wake of the new technology.

Alvin and Heidi saw a world coming that would happen much faster, a speeding up of everyday life.  They surmised, quite correctly, that the world created by so much new technology entering our lives would come as a shock to many people.  Their analogy was the culture shock caused by traveling to different country, where life and social cues seemed strange, and hard to understand at first.  They dubbed this idea "future shock," where the pace of change would overwhelm people, shocking them with its unfamiliarity.  The Tofflers were right on the money with the main idea of Future Shock.  A decade later, they went deeper into the idea of technology reshaping society with their 1980 book, The Third Wave, which I will talk about in coming chapters.

"Essentially it (Future Shock) said, that because of technology, change would be so dramatic in society, that we would all find it difficult to keep up... There would be ruptures in society as a result, as some groups were left behind, whilst others struggled."

-Ray Hammond, another futurist, quoted in the clip above, about Toffler's work

Today's political polarization, at its core, is based on people's reactions to technology, and to future shock.  The Republican party "hitched its wagon," in 2016 presidential cycle, to New York real estate billionaire, reality TV star, and blatant racist, Donald Trump.  Trump came out of the woodwork, a populist candidate from the Right, and drew a huge following, a following no traditional Republican candidate could match.  Those millions of people who blindly follow Donald Trump are now called Trump's Base.  Trump's Base is made up, almost exclusively, of the people who have been left behind by the onslaught of new technologies.

As "Red State America" has collapsed economically over the last 30 to 40 years, as most of rural and small town industrial America continues to die on the vine, tens of millions of people simply refuse to learn the new skills, and develop the personality traits needed, to function in the fast-changing, hyper connected, tech enabled world of the 21st century.  Those people, laid off from the factories and mines that closed down 20 years ago, unable adapt the new ideas needed to restart local economies, and very often living off of government checks by scamming Social Security Disability, saw hope in the silver tongued billionaire from New York.   They put their faith in the guy who said it was OK to hate immigrants, anybody with brown skin, and especially Hillary Clinton.

As I write this chapter, on Christmas Eve 2019, Donald Trump has been impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Republicans, who have now given up any pretense of respect for the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law, are struggling to kill the impeachment effort, backed by the vast majority of everyday Americans.  It's going to be an ugly fight in 2020.  But the pendulum of power and larger social trends, is swinging away from the political Right.  The inmates took over the asylum for a while, and the crackdown is beginning to happen, order from those who still believe in America's underlying principles is slowly being restored. 

We are where we are in today's world, polarized and unstable, in most every way, because so few American leaders took the work of of the Tofflers, and other forward looking people, and the large scale, underlying trends they reported, seriously.  If a lot more of the political and business leaders of the 1970's and 1980's had taken Alvin and Hiedi Toffler's work seriously, this country would be in a much different place today. The focus of the majority of business and political leaders on the short term, the next quarter, the next year, has led to our current tumultuous, and largely preventable, chaos.

Here's the 1972 documentary Future Shock, based on the Toffler's 1970 book.  It's important to remember just how long ago this was made.  To put it in a Generation X context, this documentary came out a year before Bruce Lee's classic Enter the Dragon, and two years before Evel Knievel's Snake River Canyon  jump attempt.  That was a long, long time ago, when the world was a much different place.  The Industrial Age was going strong then, and everyone "knew" it always would be.

Here is  my personal favorite interview with Alvin Toffler, from 1980, when his second book, The Third Wave, was coming out.  This is one of the most brilliant interviews anywhere.  Period.  Now 39 years old, recorded four years before the Apple Macintosh was released, the "personal computer for everybody," that completely changed society, this interview predicts a huge amount of what's happened since.  Even more important, most of Toffler's thinking is still relevant today, even if his particular examples now seem very dated.  Nearly 40 years on, three years after Alvin Toffler's death in 2016, his words still have much to teach.  This is a recorded interview, distributed on cassettes,with no video, in effect, it's a "podcast" from 1980.

Blogger's note- 8/26/2023- I have not changed any of the wording since I originally wrote these posts in 2019-2020, except for these links at the bottom.  I even left in the original typos I missed.  "Dystopia" makes a lot more sense now that we've lived through 3 1/2 years of chaos.  You can check out more of my thoughts on my Substack:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

Chapter 6: Why care about the future?

The old clips in this video of Disneylnd's Tomorrowland are a perfect example of the thinking and imaging the future at the dawn of the "Space Age" in the 1960's.  It's from that same era of future dreaming as many of the movie trailers I watched.  The monorail looked cool.  But by the time I got there and saw Disneyland, in the late 1980's, "Tomorrowland" was a complete joke.  By that point, the Jetsons-esque design from the 60's looked completely old fashioned and dated.  And "Monsanto's House of the Future?"  Yeah, that corporation's name conjures up different images in today's world.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

Tomorrowland looked old fashioned and dated by the 1980's, but hey, Space Mountain and Captain EO were fun.  But the whole thing, like most of the movies mentioned earlier, were a product of thinking only about the technology that was becoming possible, but not thinking at all about how that technology would actually affect our lives, and change our world and society itself.  That's what set Alvin and Heidi Toffler apart, they though about how real world humans would interact with all the new technology (back in the 1970's, 1980's, 1990's), how that would change our social structure, and what reactions may come from that.  Disney and the sci-fi writers mostly just used straight-line technological projection, which is flawed when trying to determine the future.

Why care about the future?

Why do you check out the weather reports?  Because they give you a glimpse of the future, the weather outside, in your area, in the next few hours, and next few days.  Whether reports give you an idea what to expect.  You check them out, see what's coming your way, and decide whether you need to change plans or take action, since you know what's headed your way, from the sky.  I see being a futurist as the same idea, just for a longer time period.  Futurists give you an idea of what's headed your way, so you can take action, if necessary.  Yet most people, for reasons that baffle me, ignore futurists, and like to be blindsided by major trends.  Then they say, I didn't see that coming," and want to be bailed out.

Since  I was a little kid, I've been fascinated by trying to figure out what the future would be like.  I was a super shy, pudgy, dorky, smart kid who sucked at sports.  Except dodgeball.  I was so afraid of getting hit by those red, 1970's era kickballs, that I got real good at dodgeball.  Anyhow, I was a geek when that was a horrible thing to be.  Geeks didn't turn into computer billionaires when I was a kid.  They just became old geeks, wearing short sleeve dress shirts to work with pocket protectors.  I got picked on a lot, as geeks do, both at school and at home.  Like most geeks, I wanted to be good at sports, or something that mattered in the world of kids.  That didn't happen until I got into BMX in high school, but BMXers were a different type of misfit at the time.

Me at age 18, on the right, running the Ferris wheel and working as manager of a tiny amusement park called The Fun Spot in Boise, Idaho, the summer of 1985.  The three girls on the ride are co-workers Kim, Michelle, and Pam.  At 18, every young person is trying to find their way into the adult world, and into the future.  I was deathly shy, pretty smart, had no money to go to college, and was running a small business with 12 employees to manage all summer.  I was also getting seriously into the weird new sport of BMX freestyle.  Yeah, and I was wearing Op short shorts for dudes.  We thought that's what guys in California wore.  We were wrong.  Photo by Vaughn Kidwell.

My "present" sucked most of the time in my childhood, everyday life was scary and depressing, as it was for millions of kids all over.  So I escaped in a number of ways.  I ran off into the woods and pretended to be a hunting guide or bush pilot in Alaska.  I escaped by reading books, mostly non-fiction.  Or I daydreamed, usually about a future where I would be cool and successful... at something.

Everybody has the things they find interesting, for me, dreaming about "the future" was one of those things.  I mean, it was the 1970's, we were supposed to have flying cars and be able to spend a weekend on the moon by the far off year 2000.  The future just had to be better than my everyday life as a kid.  It just had to.

I was born just outside the industrial city of Akron, Ohio in 1966.  That makes me one of the oldest members of what came to be called Generation X.  My family moved from town to town as I grew up, for a variety of reasons.  I went to a new school nearly every year.  Most people did not move often then.  When I was a kid, the factories in every town in Ohio were thriving.  The Great American Middle Class was in its heyday.  Times were good, if you weren't a geek like me, anyhow.

In those days, if an adult said they were from Detroit or Flint, Michigan, you knew they worked at an automaker plant, and they made MONEY.  There were people making$25, $30, and $35 an hour at a time when gas cost 65 cents a gallon.  Men went to work, women stayed home with the kids, and a single paycheck could buy the average family a decent home, if they saved up for a few years.  The little Main streets in every small town were thriving.  Most families took a week or two off for a family vacation every summer.  In Ohio, the average people went to Lake Erie for the week, and the people with a bit more money went to Florida for a week or two.  The American Industrial Age world was in full swing.  Time moved slow, things were good, they had been good for a generation, since the end of World War II, and always would be.  That's how adults of my childhood seemed to see the world.  Those adults always complained about their jobs, but the jobs paid well, so they didn't quit.  They bit the bullet day to day, and marched on.

Then, in about 1977 or 1978, I heard some adults talking about something unusual.  A factory was closing down in a town not too far away.  That was unheard of then.  Factories just didn't close down.  But it happened, and the workers got laid off.  It was crazy, the owners of the company said they were moving the factory to a place where people worked for much less money.  They were moving to a far off land... called Alabama.  People today forget that the first outsourcing of industrial jobs started with Midwestern factories moving to the American South.  That was the beginning of the factories shutting down and moving.

A couple of years later, in 1979, my dad's company, Plymouth Locomotive Works, in Plymouth, Ohio, had rumors of a buyout, and possible shutdown.  My dad quietly started sending out resume's.  Just after I finished 8th grade in Willard, Ohio, my dad got a job with a mining equipment company in New Mexico.  Plymouth Locomotive Works wound up getting bought out, and shutdown two or three years later.  Meanwhile, my Midwestern gringo family moved to Carlsbad, New Mexico, a major culture shock.  Used to being surrounded by rural Ohio white kids, I was suddenly in a school and town that was 70% Latino.  Hora le ese!

We learned quickly that tamales, enchiladas, chicken fried steak, steak fingers, guacamole, and sopapillas were all really good things.  I hated the summer heat, but came to love the wide open spaces of the western deserts.  I also worked hard to keep from getting my ass kicked by the tough Mexican kids.

Less that a year into that new life, and rumors started circulating that the mining machine company might get bought out and close down.  My dad sent more resume's out, and we wound up moving to Boise, Idaho.  My dad, a draftsman, who had worked his way up to being a design engineer, without a college degree, went to work at a much larger engineering firm.  It seemed like really bad luck that two companies my dad had worked at had threats of being shut down within a couple of years.  The reason it seemed like bad luck was that none of the adults I knew had read Alvin Toffler's books, 1970's Future Shock or 1980's The Third Wave.  Those books were off the radar of the adults I knew then.  New technology coming in and changing the nature of factory work was one of the themes Toffler saw coming.  We didn't know it then, but that was just the beginning of the collapse of the manufacturing sector in the United States.

Me as a BMX freestyler in 1990, carving tile in the Nude Bowl, in the summer of 1990.  The Nude Bowl is an empty swimming pool in the middle of nowhere, in the Southern California desert, outside of Palm Springs.  It's the ruins of an abandoned nudist colony.  At that time, when there were no skateparks in SoCal, the Nude Bowl was the one pool around that BMXers and skateboarders could session without getting hassled.  Still from my 1990, self-produced BMX freestyle video, The Ultimate Weekend.

These days, the Midwest I grew up in is known as the Rust Belt.  When you mention Detroit or Flint, Michigan, or industrial factories to people today, they most likely picture dilapidated ruins of huge buildings, covered in graffiti.  Those jobs went to industrial robots, and to the American South, and then to Mexico, then to Taiwan and South Korea and other Asian countries, and ultimately to China.

If people like my dad had read books like those Alvin Toffler wrote, they would have learned of these huge trends building, and maybe they would have made some different choices in their professional  lives.  In the case of our family, maybe we wouldn't have moved around every damn year.  Who knows?  Maybe my dad would have learned some new skills, or found a company with better long term prospects for the future.

Pierre Andre' Senizergues, riding on two side wheels, not a Primo slide.  This is a still from my 1990 self-produced BMX video, The Ultimate Weekend.  Nearly every week, from `1987 to about 1992, I spent my weekends freestyling at the Huntington Beach Pier with a couple of BMXers and skaters Pierre, Don Brown, and a few others.  At dusk one day, about 1988, I was sitting there watching Pierre practice.  I started wondering where all of us BMXer's and skaters would be years in the future.  Pierre at the time was working with a shoe company in France to make better skate shoes.  He wound up taking over the company, which became Etnies, and then Sole Technology, the parent company of Emerica and E's shoes, 32 snowboard boots, and Altamont clothes.  Who knew?

That's the value of spending some time thinking about the future, and reading and listening to futurists.  This is particularly valuable in an era of rapid change, which is what we're in right now.  Futurists are people who find this stuff interesting, and go out and read, observe, and study the changes happening out in the world.  They look for the larger and longer term trends, and try to make sense of all the different forces of change, and weigh the different variables happening.  They try to make sense of it all, and they write or speak about the trends happening.  Futurists give you a kind of longer term "weather report" about the business and social world.  When you have an idea of the larger trends at work in the world, you can make better decisions about your own life, and your own future.

That's my point in this online "book" as a blog.  I've spent my life reading, watching, learning, and thinking about these major trends and cycles.  There's a huge convergence of ultra-long term trends coming together right now.  This is making for a period of rapid change, even crazier than the last 20 or 30 years.  My own personal research has given me a big picture of what's going on, and I want to share the ideas and trends I see, with you.  You can look at them, from your own perspective, and see if any of this makes sense to you.  If so, it may help you make better informed decisions for your own life.

Pro skateboarder Ken Park, airing over the spine of Tony Hawk's Fallbrook mini ramp, 1989, during a film shoot for the Vision Skateboards video, Barge at Will.  That's me as a 23-year-old, sitting on the rail, on the right, wondering what the future holds.  Still from film by Don Hoffman.  I was Don's production assistant that day, and shot some Super 8 film that wound up in Ken's section.  I never have met Tony Hawk, but I had lunch with hid dad, Frank Hawk, that day.  Don and Frank were talking about "the old days," of skateboarding on that day in 1989.  It was an epic day for me.

Blogger's note- 8/26/2023- I have not changed any of the wording of these posts since I originally wrote them in 2019-2020.  I even left in the original typos.  "Dystopia" makes a lot more sense now that we've lived through 3 1/2 years of chaos.  You can read more of my thoughts on my Substack:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

Chapter 8: How I became an amateur futurist

The late Alvin Toffler, in the first minute of this clip, explains the role of a futurist.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

"A futurist devotes more time to thinking about the long term future, not just what's going to happen next... And we write books, and we go around the world talking to people who are, in fact, making the future...(It's) an attempt to find out who are the people that are changing, or will be changing, our lives, in the years and decades ahead."

-Alvin Toffler

How I became an amateur futurist

 As a dorky kid , I spent a lot of time daydreaming about the future, as many kids do.  My family was more dysfunctional than most, and our house was always a place of incredible psychological tension.  It was miserable.  To escape the daily drama and misery of life in our house, I would often play and pretend to be somebody successful in the future.  Along with reading and wandering around the woods, "the future" was a form of escape for me, like many other kids.  But I was a really voracious reader of non-fiction, which included my dad's Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines, which was not really what "normal" kids did.  I began to focus on the future more than most kids, thinking that the pain and fear I dealt with as a kid must be survived, and that maybe someday, many years in the future, I would do something amazing, that would make the pain of childhood worthwhile.  That's not the most sophisticated thinking, but it gave me a reason to cope with the day to day drama.  So I began to just spend more time thinking about the future than most other kids, as my family moved around rural and small town Ohio.

By the time I started my sophomore year of high school, my family had moved west to Boise, Idaho.  As a high school kid in the early 1980's, I got seriously into the weird sport of BMX racing, and then the brand new sport of BMX freestyle, or trick riding.  Everyone in my life, family and friends, thought I was completely wasting my time learning tricks on a "little kid's bike."  But BMX gave me a place to vent my teenage frustration at life, blow off my anger, and it kept me out of a lot of trouble, by giving me something to focus on.  In addition, after sucking at every sport my whole childhood (except dodgeball), I finally stuck with a sport long enough to get pretty good at it.  Much to everyone's surprise, not only did I wind up competing in national competitions, BMX freestyle turned into a career for me for several years.  

Meanwhile, in school, Boise High students had to take one year of economics.  I found that class really interesting, and turned out to be naturally good at it.  I don't think that was so much academic, as it was something close to the way I thought about the world already, and fueled by much of the non-fiction I had read as a kid.  Officially, "economics" is "the study of scarce resources."  In reality, economics is about the world of money and finance, and how business and financial trends interact.  It's about predicting the future of the financial world, something I was already interested in.  I found the economics class in high school fascinating.  I'm weird like that.  

In the spring of 1984, when I graduated from Boise High School, I didn't have the money to go to college.  I didn't really have a strong direction I wanted to go in, either, except to focus on BMX freestyle.  My high school friends and I were all outdoorsy oriented types, and collectively talked about becoming wildlife biologists.  But that meant needing the money to head north to the University of Idaho, and the money just wasn't there, so I "took a year off."  I did manage to save up $1,000 that summer, while working in a small amusement park, for $2.10 an hour.  But my family ended up needing that money for a family emergency.  As we headed into the fall of 1984, I rode my bike as much as possible, and worked nights at a large Mexican restaurant.  My freestyle teammate Jay Bickel and I did a shows with our trick team, the first BMX freestyle team in Idaho, and we rode in parades around the area. 

In the spring of 1985,  I still didn't have money for college, and my dad got laid off.  He wound up finding a new job in San Jose, California.  I worked my summer job at the Boise Fun Spot, managing the day to day operations of the small amusement park, and 12 employees.  My pay was still low, $3.15 an hour, but it was great experience in management for an 18-19 year old.  In late August, I packed up my ugly, brown, 1971 Pontiac Bonneville, and drove solo to San Jose.  I got a job at a local Pizza Hut, and continued riding my bike all day, and working nights.  I started publishing a BMX freestyle zine, and soon met the NorCal freestylers, as I mentioned in the last chapter.  

A year later, I took the job at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines, and became part of the little BMX/freestyle industry.  At 20 years old, without ever taking a college course, I was suddenly working at national magazines, and responsible for proofreading both magazines.  I quickly began to learn how media works, and the influence advertisers had over the traditional media of the pre-internet world.  The pro riders who had been my heroes a year or two before, became friends and acquaintances.  

At the time, the BMX freestyle world was focused in a few dozen small scenes, small groups where a couple of guys had seen a trick show, got interested in freestyle, and then started a trick team in their area.  Almost everyone had their own trick team, and promoting our weird, new little sport was important to us.  As BMX freestyle grew exponentially over the next 3 or 4 years, I not only saw, but was in the middle of, a new movement.  BMX freestyle was an idea growing and spreading through society.  I saw how small groups, which I now call Creative Scenes, are born, grow, attract others, and spread a new idea.  At the time, I didn't realize what I was seeing, except that I began to sense that there was something important to these scenes.  I saw how some scenes were better than others, and the differences between them.  The Golden Gate Park scene was the most cohesive, the tightest group, and others were a bit more informal.  But all were innovative, creative, and influenced new people, and attracted new riders into our sport, as BMX freestyle sparked into the national scene in its first wave of popularity.  I also noticed the same was true with skateboarding, the older sport of surfing, the tiny (then) sport of snowboarding, inline skating, and mountain biking.  While us BMX guys were wrapped up in our own sport, we often rode with skateboarders.  As the late 1980's rolled by, I began to realize all of these weird action sports had more in common than we wanted to admit.  I began to wonder why all of these individual, session oriented sports, where competitions weren't the most important thing, were happening at the same time. 

Then, at the bicycle industry trade show in January 1989, talk was in the air.  Industry people were walking around, actually saying, "BMX is dead, mountain bikes are the new thing."  Every company pulled its support from BMX racing and freestyle, and put money into the new mountain bike idea.  Our industry collapsed as the world declared BMX was dead.  But us hardcore riders kept riding.  We got "real" jobs, if we didn't have them already, and scrimped and saved to get to contests.  BMX went into recession in early 1989, a year before the national economy did.  BMX freestyle went underground.

At the same time I was working in the BMX and skateboard industries in the late 1980's, the Southern California real estate market was soaring.  Two different people I worked with bought a house one year, and made $100,000 on it in a single year.  Everywhere in SoCal we were hearing stories of people making fortunes off of real estate.  I was a young guy in my early 20's, not making much money, and every Saturday I'd eat breakfast while "Make Money in Real Estate" infomercials playing in front of me on TV.  I thought that if I could learn about real estate, and make a bunch of money, I'd have more time to ride my bike.  I bought one of the courses about real estate, and began to read books on the subject.  

I was really shy, and didn't have the guts to really try and buy a house, but I began to learn about the Southern California real estate market.  Like my interest in economics in high school, a big part of real estate is predicting where the market and the economy would be a year, or two, or five, in the future.  I began to pay attention to the dynamics of the real estate market, and wondering where things were headed.

By Christmas time 1989, after the BMX world had collapsed, things at Vision Skateboards, the parent company of where I worked, were starting to head downhill.  I worked at Unreel Productions, a video production company that was trying to sell TV shows of skateboarding, bodyboarding,  BMX racing and BMX freestyle, six years before the X-Games started.  The TV industry wasn't ready for those sports yet. 

My parents had moved from San Jose, California to Greensboro, North Carolina, and they wanted to fly me back east to spend Christmas with them.  I decided to not take my bike, though I was staying there a week.  My first night in Greensboro, I went with my parents to the grocery store, and I went to the book rack, looking for a book to read.  I knew I was going to be bored as fuck that week, for the most part, and I needed something to pass the time.  I picked up a book called, The Great Depression of 1990, by economist Ravi Batra.  Yeah, I nice little up lifting book of light reading about economics and a complete financial collapse.  Like I said, I'm weird like that.  

The book explained a lot about long term economic cycles in the U.S. economy, mostly 10 year, 30 year, and 60 year cycles.  Being the geek I am, I found it fascinating.  Now, the reality is that we didn't go into in a Great Depression in 1990, as Batra predicted.  But we did go into a recession, with a collapse in the stock markets and the real estate markets.  It turned out to be a good thing that I didn't buy a house in 1989, which I almost did.  The economic downturn dragged on into a stagnant economy that lasted through 1996.  The mainstream economists called it a "double-dip recession."  While we didn't get the full great depression Ravi Batra predicted, almost everything he predicted did come true, just not to the full extent he was expecting.  

That got me interested in the financial markets.  I began watching them every day in the newspaper, watching to see if the market went up or down, and then reading the thoughts of the business people, investors, and economists on why they thought it went up or down.  By doing this, I began to get a feel of why the stock markets ticked up and down day to day, and a sense of why they moved up or down over the longer term.  Like real estate, I wound up as interested in the dynamics of the market, and wanted to understand it, as much as I wanted to just make a bunch of money. 

In his book, and a follow-up book, Batra also introduced me to a theory called the Law of Social Cycle by a thinker from India, named P.R. Sakar.  This theory says there are four basic mentalities in every society, and one of those mentalities dominates the society at any given time.  This mentality shapes society, and there are ultra long term cycles involving these cycles, which gives yet another way to get a sense of where the world is heading in the future.  This added to the ideas about predicting future trends percolating around the back of my head. I lived in the BMX and skateboard world  of the early 1990's, where top pro riders ate ramen on a regular basis, because sponsorships were few and far between.  The Law of Social Cycle became more influential on my thinking later on, when I realized it explained other trends I was watching happen in the world.  I'll get deeper into that theory in a future chapter.  

Blogger's note- 8/27/2023- I haven't changed anything in these posts since I wrote them in 2019-2020, except for these notes at the bottom.  I even left the original typos in.  My thoughts about the 2020's make a lot more sense now that we're 3 1/2 years into the chaos.  you can read more of my writing on my Substack:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

Chapter 9: "The Blade Runner" future... and the future we actually got

Here's another look at the future acclaimed movie director Ridley Scott predicted for our time, Los Angeles in November 2019, as predicted back in 1982.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

When the idea for this writing project came to me, three months ago, as I type this blog post, I didn't realize that I was living in the time period and location that the 1982 movie, Blade Runner, tried to predict.  I didn't see that movie in its entirety until years after it was released.  I knew it was considered a classic futuristic sci-fi movie for its day.  In 1982, as a high school kid in Idaho, a far off distant future, with flying cars, weird, stream-lined buildings, and lots of human-like androids, was a common vision of what our future might be like.  That Blade Runner world, and similar dystopian scenarios like it, were the future us Generation X kids were shown growing up, in movies and TV.

Now we're in that exact time period, myself, and ten million other people in the L.A. metro area, the initial setting of Blade Runner.  But the real world of late 2019, and now early 2020 as I type this onto the internet, is much different than Ridley Scott envisioned.  It's also much different than the world we lived in, back in 1982.  In a word, today's world is crazy.
 

Our society, by and large, has shifted away from a mass market, mass media world, into world of millions of niches.  But masses of people, everyday, average, working people, in the streets, was a dominant theme around the world in 2019. Populist movements sprang up or grew, around the globe, and not a replicant to be found.  So much for the Blade Runner world.

These days, most everyone is rushed, we all have trouble finding enough time to get everything done.  Most people work long hours at a job, then commute, then drive the kids around, and do the work their home requires.  At the same time, people walk around, ride buses, and drive their cars, staring at a small screen on a device, their smart phones.  These devices have more computing power than the mission control center of the Apollo space program had in the 1970's.  In all the futuristic movies and TV shows of the 1960's, 1970's, and early 1980's, no one I remember predicted smart phones, the internet, and wifi taking over, like they have in our actual world today.  Of all those programs, the cartoon The Jetson's, was the closest to reality, in that respect.

Yes, in the original Star Trek TV series, Captain Kirk and the crew had "communicators"  when they went down to the planets.  But we never saw Kirk or Spock watching cat videos, ball games, playing Candy Crush, ordering from Amazon, or watching intergalactic porn.  The Jetson's, the original Star Trek TV show, Blade Runner, and other shows did have tele-conferencing, like Skype or Facetime in our real world.

But all the great writers and directors 40 or 50 years ago didn't foresee the mass adoption of smart phones or the internet, the most influential technologies of real world 2019/2020.  In addition, no one back then expected the widespread political polarization, except Alvin and Heidi Toffler, he mentioned the possibility in an interview in 1980.  No one back then predicted the hyper-connected, phone and internet-based world, the intense political polarization, that a ten year old could make a million dollars a year making videos about giant gummy worms (over 140 million views), the rise of the Kardashians, that one man named Jeff Bezos would be worth more than GE and Ford combined,  that there would be 30,000 homeless people in downtown L.A.,  the rise of quadcopter drones, proximity flying, or that Bruce Jenner was really a chick in an Olympian man's body.

How did things get so crazy and weird?  How did our society get to where it is now?  Where are we headed?  A lot of people ask these questions, particularly older people who remember a pre-tech world that moved at a much slower, and had a much more stable feeling pace.

I've come across three social theories that I believe describe different aspects of today's world, and how we got here, really well.  My own thinking adds to these.  I believe I can give a larger context, where today's chaotic world actually makes some sense.  So let's take a look at these three theories. 

In the 1970's, being sent to our rooms as kids was a punishment.  No one then predicted that 40 years later getting kids out of their rooms would be a much bigger problem.  A drawing I  made for my nephew, on his game room door, last year. 

Blogger's note- 8/27/2023- I haven't changed anything in these posts since I originally wrote them in 2019-2020, except these notes at the bottom.  I even left in the typos I missed.  My ideas about the 2020's make a lot more sense now that we are 3 1/2 years into the chaos.  You can check out more of my writing at my Substack:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

43

Chapter 10: The Toffler's Third Wave

The late Alvin Toffler again.  In this interview he explains his idea of the three major waves of society, and how he believes we're entering the Third Wave, the information-based age.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

"We're on our way to what I believe are going to be a series of institutional "Katrinas," we're going to see one institution after another collapse, or become totally ineffective.  And it's not just the U.S.... the same thing's true in Tokyo, the same thing's true in a bunch (of countries)."

-Alvin Toffler, in 2007, the interview above, promoting his 2007 book, Revolutionary Wealth.  By "Katrinas" he's referring to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina, then in everyone's recent memory, and which caused catastrophic damage to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of the U.S..

The Three Theories that I think best explain today's world

All of these three theories, these concepts, have been around for at least 15 years, two of them for much  longer.  They are all well known in certain circles.  But these ideas that can explain today's chaotic world are almost completely unknown to the majority of average people, and even many business people and people in political circles.  It's another paradox of our emerging Information Age, this well thought out information is basically unknown to the people who could most be helped by it.

Hey, there are billions of web pages out there, probably tens of millions of pages of actual physical books, and millions of hours of TV shows, videos, audio books, podcasts, and other media now available.  There's way to much information for any single person, or even small group of people, to ever ingest or keep track of.  Plus, most people simply aren't interested in the information that could most help them live better lives.  So when a very predictable event happens, most people get blindsided by it.

That's why there are weirdos, like me, who find this deep stuff fascinating, and will read through tens of thousands of pages of information, dig through thousands of hours of books on tape, lectures, and interviews, and find what we think is truly important.  Then we filter all this information, condense the complicated ideas, and put the most important parts in a form that a larger number of people may want to read and ingest.  My synopses of these huge, complicated concepts are intentionally pretty simplistic in this book/blog thing.  I want to convey the main concepts that so many people are unaware of.  Once you hear these ideas, you can dig into the deeper levels of these concepts all you want.  The information is out there.

The Toffler's Third Wave

This concept comes from the 1980 book, The Third Wave, by Alvin and Heidi Toffler.  Full disclosure, I haven't read The Third Wave itself, my understanding of the basic idea comes from reading the Toffler's later books, War and Anti-War, Previews & Premises, and Revolutionary Wealth, as well as several interviews and talks online with/by Alvin Toffler.

Looking back over known human history, we know that for tens of thousands of years, modern humans were living in small tribes and bands.  They were what we call hunter/gatherers.  They hunted wild animals, foraged for fruits, vegetables, herbs and such, but didn't plant crops.  They often migrated with the food sources over the course of each year.  They lived in small tribes, in tune with their natural surroundings.  Their tools were made from stone, bones, and wood and other natural materials.  While we call these people "primitive," they understood the natural world of their region in a way none of us modern humans do.  You're not really an "environmentalist," until you learn to live as these people did, and truly begin to understand the natural world, and its cycles.

In any case, about 10,000 years ago, as Alvin Toffler describes in the clip above, a person somewhere near Turkey, planted the first crop that is known to us.  This person, most likely a woman, started the agricultural revolution, and farming grew slowly, and ultimately spread around the Earth.  This is the First Wave of civilization, as the Toffler's see it.  These three waves, were/are waves of change, which is an important aspect to remember.

Agriculture changed the way people lived.  For the first time, with people becoming farmers, they stayed in one place indefinitely.  Instead of small tribal villages of a few dozen people, small towns and then cities began to evolve.  Political structures, like kings and queens, began to emerge, and so did the specialization of work, not everyone had to be a farmer.  Craftspeople emerged, people who made pottery or wove baskets or built furniture, and traded their goods with farmers for food.  Many very fundamental things first emerged, like writing, government, property ownership, and money.   The basic pieces of what we call civilization began at that time, according to our known history.

Most importantly, for my purposes here, is the idea that agriculture completely changed the way human beings lived, it changed the everyday lives of every single person in society.  There are a lot of levels and nuances to this.  But the main idea to remember is that as a new wave of change, like agriculture, sweeps over society, it changes the way every person lives, and it changes how society itself operates.  Agriculture grew very, very slowly, by our standards, over a couple of thousand years, but it eventually took over nearly every part of the world.

About 350 years ago, in the Toffler's thinking, the Second Wave of change began, the Industrial Revolution.  Machines were invented that made agriculture and mechanical work easier, and amplified the work a person could do.  Mechanical innovation increased, drastically amplified by the invention of the steam engine.  Again, a great wave of change crashed over society, as small shops used new machines, and eventually some grew into large factories.  This Second Wave happened quite a bit faster, and spread around much of the world in a couple of hundred years, where agriculture took a thousand or two thousand years, to change most of the world.

Me in an ugly selfie with a huge mill wheel of some kind, a leftover from the early Industrial Age, in Richmond Virginia, spring of 2019.  Photo by Steve Emig

With the factories growing, we saw the rise of large, industrial cities.  Millions of people left the farms, and moved to the cities.  Time became much more important, you can't be late to a job on an assembly line, or everybody's waiting on you.  Jobs were invented, for the first time in history, getting paid money for a day's work.  Before, people did one trade or craft for life, operating as their own small business.  Transportation, better boats, ships, trains, and eventually cars, grew much faster, and opened up huge areas of the world for development.  Fossil fuels boomed, needed to power the growth, the trains, the factories, and all the vehicles.  Things we take for granted, like water and sewer systems, became incredibly important as large cities developed.  Newspapers, and eventually other forms of mass media evolved.  Mass markets were developed to sell the products created by the mass numbers of people living in massive cities, built in massive factories.  Marketing became much more important, to convince people they actually needed more stuff, to keep the growing mass consumer economy working.

Again, a huge wave of change swept over human society, and it changed the life of every single person involved, in a dramatic way.  In the Second Wave, the shift to the Industrial Age, this initial change happened over a couple of hundred years, several human generations.  This Industrial Age was the age that three of our current generations living were born into, the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers, and my posse, Generation X.  For all of us over about 40-45 years old, the Industrial Age is our "normal."  That's what we see as "a traditional society," just because we grew up in it.  The Industrial Age was an age of mass markets, mass culture, mass media, mass education, mass religion (no pun intended Catholics), and with an incredible emphasis on conformity.  At the height of the late Industrial Age, around the 1940's and 1950's, well over 50% of Americans worked in factories.  The mantra was, "Do as you're told, be like everyone else, and keep your ideas to yourself."

Then came the Third Wave, the change to an information-based society.  Suddenly, ideas became the great source of wealth and innovation, not land or natural resources.  The Tofflers put the beginning of the information-based society at 1956.  That was the first year that "white collar" office workers first outnumbered "blue collar" factory workers in the United States.  But as we've seen, these revolutions in society, these waves of change, start slowly, and they build.  As they build, the rate of change increases in speed.  So few people really noticed that the office workers were growing into a larger group than the factory workers at the time.

What people noticed were new technologies, like the TV replacing radio, new appliances for the home, and the evolving cars.  People also noticed that the push towards conformity, the institutional racism, sexism, and disrespect of all minorities in the long time White dominated society, was causing fractures, which turned into several social movements.  The 1960's saw the civil rights movement for blacks, the women's movement, the gay rights movement, and then the hippies, the "fuck everything, let's get high and screw" movement.  

To the establishment power structure of the day, everyone seemed to be getting uppity and society seemed to be collapsing.  In reality, several long oppressed groups just got to the point where they fought back against the longstanding, institutional oppression.  These were the changes most obvious, as attitudes began to change, rebelling against the conformist nature of the Industrial Age.

 As an Old School BMX bike rider, I take pride in the fact that a couple of avid bike riders, who owned a bike shop in 

Dayton, Ohio, are the guys who invented the first airplane.  With that, they also invented the aviation industry.  Orville and Wilbur Wright, getting air in North Carolina, 1903.  Public domain photo, meme by Steve Emig.

But the the Information-based Age, as the Toffler's generally refer to it, was rooted in new technology.  Where mechanical inventions that amplified human and animal labor were the root of the Industrial Age, intellectual, electronic, communication, and biological innovations are the root of the Information Age.  Those started hitting society in rapid succession when us Generation X kids were young.  Pocket calculators.  Audio cassettes. Touch tone phones.  Cable TV.  Pong, the first video game.  Credit cards became widespread.  VCR's.  Early "hobby" personal computers.  Home video cameras.  The fax machine.  The Macintosh, the personal computer "normal people" could operate.  Car phones.  The Sony Walkman.  Desktop publishing on home computer printers.  Then came the internet, and, like Han Solo in the Millenium Falcon, things jumped to light speed.  In the 1990's, us humans were bombarded with a whole range of new technologies.   That continues today with ever-upgrading devices, new software and systems to learn, and other exponentially increasing technologies.

Us older folks, who grew up dialing rotary dial phones, were not just overwhelmed by the increasing pace of change, our lives became continual change.  This didn't just happen in our home lives, the new technology was one one of the main drivers of the collapse of the factory system.  The factories that employed half of the people in the U.S. began to shut down at a rapid pace.  No one knows the exact numbers.  But about half of those good paying factory jobs were lost to new technologies, like industrial robots and other technology, and about half were lost because of outsourcing jobs to other countries.  It was cheaper for major corporations to shut down a factory full of high paid, Midwestern workers, and move that job to a place with cheap labor.  In the 1970's, jobs moved first to the American South, then the big waves of outsourcing followed, taking jobs to Mexico,  Japan, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and eventually, China.

As the Information Age washed over American society, and that of other industrial nations, we saw the rise of the geeks.  Once the dorky kids that got picked on in high school, some of them turned into a new wave of multi-millionaires and billionaires, becoming the entrepreneurs with the ideas that built the Information Age.  People like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell and others rose to levels of incredible wealth faster than anyone in human history ever had.  This happened because they had the fundamental ideas that were the backbone and infrastructure for this new era.  So we had the paradox of the most rapid fortunes in history being built at the same time we had tens of millions of average working Americans (and workers in other countries), losing the jobs they planned to work for their entire lives.

Again this is one basic aspect of the Tofflers Third Wave concept.  The big point I want to make here is that this is what is happening right now.  We are still in the middle of this huge shift from the Industrial Age, that was going strong in the 1970's, into a completely different, Information Age.  This changes how everything in society works.  It's a huge wave of many types of change, and it's not over.  We still have a legal system, a government system, an education system, political parties, non-profit groups, and many other institutions from the Industrial Age.  This is something that has only happened two previous times in known human history.  The First Wave took well two thousand years or more, to sweep around the world.  The Second Wave took several human generations, a couple of hundred years, to sweep around the world.  This Third Wave of change is happening in a single human lifetime.

It's OK to be freaked out by the rapid change in our society, no one group of humans has ever had to deal with massive change happening this fast.  Ever.

There is a reason our world is so chaotic.  This is a massive amount of change to deal with.  No group of humans has ever had to deal with this level of societal change in such a short time.  There is no road map, no one has done this before.  We're making it up as we go.  This huge, incredible, increasingly fast wave of change affects the life of every single person.  The technology genie is out of the bottle, and it's not going back in.  We are never going "back to a simpler time."  There are really good reasons that things seem so crazy, and frantic, and chaotic.  It's because they are.

Hundreds of millions of people, myself included, are experiencing the "future shock," that Alvin and Heidi Toffler predicted in their first book, Future Shock, in 1970.  Huge swaths of our society are struggling to simply survive and cope with this incredible level of change.  Tens of millions of people have already been left behind by the change, and don't seem too motivated to try and catch up.

Yet, 50 years after Future Shock was published, most people still don't realize that this is why things are chaotic.  Simply knowing, and acknowledging, "OK, we're in this massive wave of change, THAT'S WHY the world seems real crazy, " helps.  It gives us a sense of why things are tough, and a place to catch our breath, and begin working towards coping with this onslaught of change.  Realizing just how big of a period of unprecedented change ALL OF US are in, can help us plan to build the remaining aspects of the Information Age in a way that works for everyone, as much as possible.

Blogger's note- 8/27/2023- I haven't changed anything in these posts since I originally wrote them in 2019-2020, except these notes at the bottom.  I even left in the original typos that I missed.  My ideas about the 2020's make more sense now that we're 3 1/2 years into the chaos.  You can check out more of my writing at my Substack:

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack

 

Chapter 11: P.R. Surf's up Brah... the long term waves of the U.S. economy

A classic scene that sums up a lot of the 1980's mainstream  business mentality, Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, telling the crowd, "Greed is good."  This Oliver Stone movie looked at the excesses of Wall Street, coming out in 1987, shortly after Black Monday, a day where the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 22% in one day.  This movie also came out a year after the 1986 Reagan Tax cuts, that set the stage for today's incredible wealth inequality.

Written by Steve Emig, The White Bear

As I mentioned earlier, while visiting my parents for Christmas, in December of 1989, I picked up a book called The Great Depression of 1990, by economist Ravi Batra.  Being the geek I am, I found it fascinating.  Now, the U.S. didn't go into the great depression in 1990 that Batra predicted.  But we did go into what was termed a "double dip recession," in 1990.

The definition of "recession" then was an economic contraction for two consecutive quarters.  In real people speak, that means the economy shrinks for six months, or more, instead of growing.  There's a new, convoluted definition of recession, which basically allows economists to avoid calling a recessions a recession now.  Orwellian newspeak aside, a "depression", by definition, is an economic downturn for three years, and a "great depression" is an economic downturn for five years.  In this long term chart of California real estate prices, you can see the prices rose slightly after the recession started in 1990, but didn't start coming back until 1997, as the Dot Com craze, fueled by that new thing called the internet, took over the stock markets and business world.  We were actually a lot closer to a great depression in the early 1990's than anyone wanted to admit.  It was not to the extent that Ravi Batra predicted, but it was a lot worse, and a lot longer, than anyone else seemed to see coming.

 As wealth continues to concentrate at the top of the economic scale, an ultra long limo makes its way through Hollywood, California in late 2019.  Photo by Steve Emig.

Part of Batra's economic prediction was based on 30 year, and 60 year, economic cycles he saw in the entire economic history of the United States.  The only exception was for about 30 years after the Civil War, which dramatically disrupted normal business cycles.  The rest of the time in U.S. history, we had a depression every 30 years.  If it skipped the 30 year mark, then we had a great depression at the 60 year mark.  So 1990 was 60 years after the start of the Great Depression of the 1930's.  But we didn't have a full blown great depression in 1990, so now, as we enter 2020, we're at a thirty year mark from 1990's double dip recession.  We're also at the 90 year mark from the 1930's Great Depression.

The U.S. stock markets have been propped up with easy, cheap money, by the Federal Reserve, since the Great Recession of 2007-2009.  In September 2019, The Fed had to go into crisis mode, pumping more than a trillion dollars into the economy so far, to keep the markets from crashing, after the Repo Markets seized up.  What was started as a couple weeks of "liquidity," has now become life support, and this rolling bailout of the banking system can't be stopped without collapsing the U.s.stock markets, and other markets around the world.  You know, today's Wall Street, the Gordon Gekko types of today's world.  As The Fed tried to figure out how to get out of this mess they created, the global economy is slowing, with dismal growth projections, even China's stellar growth is slowing down, though it's still far beyond other large countries.  The world's economy is grinding to a halt, oddly right on track with the 30 year cycles Batra used to make his predictions back in the late 1980's.

But it's not these 30 year economic cycles that I found most interesting in Batra's 1989 book.  He also wrote a chapter about an obscure theory called the Law of Social Cycle, written by a spiritual guru and thinker in India, by the name of Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar.  P. R. Sarkar is a weird character, pretty much unknown to American intellectuals.  Yet, using that one chapter Batra wrote about The Law of Social Cycle, and watching most of what Batra predicted in 1989 play out, I began to see great merit in The Law of Social Cycle.  By looking forward to what it predicted, I realized in the late 1990's that there should be a massive populist uprising, at some point, in the future of the United States.  During the Dot Com stock bubble fury, where damn near everybody jumped in the stock market, this sounded ridiculous.  It was a "new economy," and "things were going to just keep going up forever."  We heard those quotes, or very similar ones, day after day in the business news media then.  Why would there ever be a time when average people would feel the need to rise up against the world of Big Business and the super rich?  Damn near everybody was feeling the wealth in the late 1990's.

Yet, during that era of stock market euphoria, I realized that a massive workers' revolt was in store, somewhere down the line, if The Law of Social Cycle held true.  I even wrote about it a bit, just in my little zines, and told some people in conversation.  I also came to think of the action sports world as "the warrior sports," though they were then tagged with the lame, X-Games hyped tag, "Extreme Sports."  The rise of a new category of individual-oriented sports was also something to be expected, in a world where The Law of Social Cycle made sense.  These sports, most of which were born in the 1960's to the 1990's, have gone worldwide in a few decades.  They've become so popular, that the Olympics, the freakin' OLYMPICS, needed to add some of them to insure the American TV ratings, which is the main source of funding for the entire Olympic system.  Without snowboarding in winter Olympics, they couldn't afford to put on the games.  BMX racing was added to the summer games in 2008, and skateboarding and BMX park riding will be demo sports in 2020.  These sports have become so popular in 40 years, that the Olympics organizers feel the need to tap into them to keep TV ratings high in future games.  This is the rise of the Warrior mentality sports, which I'll explain more in the next chapter.

A rider backflips over a jump at the 2018 D.I.Y. World Championships, a low-budget, hardcore BMX event,  loved by top riders, in Richmond, Virginia, in October of 2018.  Riders like him will be a demo sport in the 2020 Summer Olympics.  Photo by Steve Emig

We're now deep into the rise of the populist movements, not just in the U.S., but in many parts of the world.  Average working people are in the streets, motivated, in large part, by the long term decline in their standard of living.  This populist uprising caught fire here in the U.S. first as Occupy Wall Street, then died down and went underground.  But the dissension continued to bubble, and rose again, evidenced by the surprising mass popularity of 2016 presidential candidates Donald Trump, on the political Right, and Bernie Sanders on the political Left.  While they had much different views on how the government should be run, both candidates tapped into large numbers of everyday working people, or often, formerly working people, who felt left behind by the mainstream candidates.  This caused a splintering and fracturing of both major political parties in the U.S., which is also something inferred by The Law of Social Cycle.

So what is P.R. Sarkar's Law of Social Cycle?  It's the second big theory that I think really helps put today's crazy world in context. I'll explain it in the next chapter.

Written by Steve Emig.

Blogger's note- 9/12/2023- I haven't changed anything in these posts since I wrote them, except these notes at the bottom.  I even left in the typos i originally missed.  As of the late summer of 2023, I'm doing most of my new writing on Substack.  Check it out.

Steve Emig: The White Bear's Substack